throw__away7391

I'd 100% rather bike around a Waymo than a human driver.

This is immensely preferable to having a new order of self appointed alignment councils determine what is "in the interest of humanity".

We have already seen this play out to a much lesser degree in social media.

It appears to me that in most of Europe there is an unspoken bargain: society provides you with a reasonably comfortable and secure life where your basic needs are guaranteed at least to some level, and in exchange you are supposed to stay in your lane, make sure your ambitions match and follow one of the approved tracks, and leave things like starting businesses to a hidden aristocracy with family money, who for their part generally accept higher demands on their contributions and avoid "vulgar" displays of their wealth in exchange.

Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to

No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.

I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that it works this way. Parents' concerns for their children are far more self-serving than most parents claim. Consider that every "for the children" political agenda ever has nakedly ulterior motives--name one truly pro-child policy where children are directly prioritized at the expense of their parents? Consider the way that school schedules are oriented around their parents' convenience in spite of decades of studies showing the harmful health effects they have. During COVID we saw dramatic efforts to protect the elderly coupled with a push to reopen schools by parents tired of having to take care of them all day. Whatever you think of the restrictions one way or another, the prioritization of elderly was apparent throughout. These are the same parents who have repeated voted benefits for themselves at the direct expense of their children, saddling them with trillions of dollars of debt to support their own present consumption. I promise you, if seniors were regularly being gunned down like this they would have found a solution already.

Well they happen in schools and children don’t vote. If this had been a wave of senior center shootings, something would have been done a long, long time ago.

No, this is about the fragile ego of the President taking petty revenge on a company the didn't go along with every whim of his administration.

Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).

I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.

I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.